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Aristocratic Glamour and the Spiritual Alternative

19 Thursday Dec 2024

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Fragment 209, Word count: 579.

tags: aristocracy, value culture, violence, science, religion, arts-washing, spirituality, time, ideality.

The culture of violence is a core element of aristocracy, out of whose practices in an earlier historical era emerged the forms of modern sovereign state governments. The culture of violence separates aristocracy from ‘bourgeois’ culture, which aspires to achieve the same luxuries, prestige, and level of consumption without the overt and personal use of violence. The aristocratic culture of violence is still an active presence in the modern world, even in the most democratic polities. Sovereign states still base their authority on a near monopoly of violence. Crime families and criminal organizations (true heirs of aristocracy) generally cling to the culture of violence as an indispensable instrument for achieving their goals, and so do the political forces in the right-wing or conservative tradition, which is clear from the importance of guns to the political right-wing. The culture of violence is inseparable from the aristocratic value culture of tangible rewards, mainly clustered around competitions for scarce and exclusive property wealth, trophy possessions, along with coercive power, and such a value culture still dominates popular aspirations and conceptions of personal success. A great deal of arts-washing has always been showcased to hide the viciousness of aristocratic venality and to manufacture an image of aristocratic glamour.

The Ultimate Left

Ultimately, the political left must be a spiritual alternative to the material treasures of violence-based wealth systems grounded in competitive property possession, but also to the great-spirit-in-the-sky religions of our dystopian past. The spiritual alternative is a matter of recognizing the anomalous existence of teleological orientation and bearing, ideality busily self-amending as an embodied “I” active in the creation and recreation of futurity. To say that intelligence is caring is to say that intelligence is an “I”, a personality, an embodied idiosyncratic caring. Caring expresses a very strict kind of particularity: of sensitivities in aid of felt dramas, of powers to recognize relevance and structural connections for interior model-world-construction as the framework and lens of perception within personal orientation, particularity of point of view, of quests and questions, of curiosity, of pleasures, of aesthetic gratifications, of energy, of the self-declaring voice. Perception is not an imprinting somehow made upon an innocent and passively receptive consciousness. It is an active intervention by an ideality, a reaching and taking hold, an interest-driven study that is performed in a vast echo-chamber of personal recollections and anticipations. The “I” of this discreet spiritual existence, this ideality, is appropriately followed by a name, indicative of a rich uniqueness: “I, Odysseus”.

Each such anomalous existence is one among a multitude of points and arcs of improvisational indeterminacy in existence, the existential opposite of a black hole, creating new reality all the time and experiencing value in creating. The inventive freedom of each individual ideality means that no form of social, economic, or cultural organization is strictly determined (say, by divine fiat or natural law) to be or remain as it has been. It follows from this that the scientific consensus on fundamental reality is decisively incomplete, and, as such, wrong, just as any previous religious consensus was. The fact of ideality’s metaphysical status as an anomaly (shining peak vs black hole) with respect to the brute actuality of nature, means that neither individually embodied instances of spirit nor their creations are subject to the two normal justifications for social hierarchies: decrees of capricious divine will and the deterministic laws that describe brute material actuality.

Embedded links:

Fragment 195, October 21, 2022, Spirituality of the Left (word count: 474)

Fragment 205, February 3, 2024, Our Dystopian Past (word count: 1,543)

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.

Our Dystopian Past

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Fragment 205, word count: 1,543.

tags: Christendom, modernity, literacy, justice, progress, religion, science, sovereignty, hive-mind, time, humanism.

The conception of social organization in feudal Christendom identified three Platonic functional groups stacked as a power pyramid. Muscle-power workers formed the most numerous and the lowest stratum. Baronial fighting families formed the next level up (a big step up) and were far fewer than workers. The barons held formal possession of land, natural resources, and often workers, and maintained a culture of armed violence (chivalry, armed men on horses) to enforce that possession. Priests and their organization, the Church of Rome, formed, in theory, the high point of the pyramid. The clergy were supposed to be Plato’s contemplative, highly educated, other-worldly ruling class. They also claimed to be God’s agents on Earth. The baronial aristocracy disputed this way of understanding things to some extent but could not maintain their position of parasitic dominance without the authority that came from the culture and organization of religion.

The two power-factions asserted the necessity of an eternal stability in the order of society. Both aristocracy (of which monarchy is just a feature) and the theocratic hierarchy of the Christian religion planned with fervent determination to keep the arrangement of property, status, knowledge, and coercive power exactly as they had arranged it for their own parasitic benefit. There was a Platonic influence here as well since Plato declared that reality was strictly unchanging. The passing of time was an illusion for Plato. However, there was a way in which some change and continuity were reconciled, and that was by something like Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence of the same”. Seasons change, but in a continuously repeating cycle that expresses a circle, an eternally closed loop. The vast majority of the general population accepted metaphysical determinism in the social order and found it a theme of common discourse. They were taught by the parasitic power factions to be afraid and to feel dependent. Notwithstanding this intent and practical control, nothing like complete stability was ever realized. Medieval horizons* expanded profoundly, and yet, there were blind spots, directions in which horizons did not expand. The general parasitic hierarchy of society persisted and still does.

In Christendom the core ideas of religion included universally inherited guilt coupled with supernatural surveillance for the purpose of moral ledger-keeping on every person’s thoughts and deeds, all leading toward an inevitable, generally merciless, and eternally binding reckoning at the time of an individual’s death. Of course, that made the ever-looming prospect of death terrifying, and the Church proclaimed itself as essentially God-on-Earth, the only way out. Just as the coercive power of aristocracy resulted from its culture of violence, the power of the Church depended upon its monopolistic culture of sacred knowledge, the Revelation it claimed to possess concerning the Divine drama involving every individual’s fate after death. As for the aristocracy, their iconic form was as armed men on horses, claiming everything as their property and asserting that claim with practiced violence toward anyone unable to resist with equal violence. These are the cultural niches which conceived and put into practice the form of human organization which would mutate into the sovereign state. Sovereignty was focused on securing the ownership of private property by force but also on religious mystery-cult insistence on group belonging and conformity (communal hive-mind). Patriarchs of religious pageantry were from time immemorial more bookish than the captains of horses and chariots. In Medieval Europe the clergy still cultivated the scribal culture of book knowledge. Their literary and mental skills were indispensable in their role as advisers and administrators for aristocrats, keeping records of contracts, costs, products, properties, distributions, income, and consumption. However, in monastic libraries and after 1088 in increasing numbers of universities, they also kept alive surviving vestiges of ancient pagan literary culture. The rediscovered texts of philosophy, science, and mathematics from ancient Greece, Rome, India, and the Islamic east were recognized as profoundly more complex and advanced than anything native to Western Christendom, containing knowledge and courses of thought that opened vast horizons.

Although there was a very early association of writing with supernatural powers and magic, and with top-down imperial organization, scribal culture developed in a way that makes it independently relevant wherever language-based ways of learning and understanding are involved, and ultimately cultivates the inscribing of individual voices, beyond the reach of other streams of culture. Intrinsic to scribal culture, although often uncredited, is an experience of spirituality that is completely at odds with the top-down centralized hierarchy typical of religions and traditional military-based sovereignty. The graphic representation of language is a technology by which an individual’s thinking can become untethered from the particular conversations available with familiar and proximate people, from the common discourse. Written utterances can join a conversation with people long dead or with imagined future people. A writer can develop a persona and voice quite separate from any that engages with contemporary relationships and pre-occupations. Time as experienced in the process of personal writing untethered from commonplace conversations opens in the direction of discoveries and creative opportunities and as such is progressive (modern) and starkly different from the cyclical repetitive time as normally represented in traditional conservative community discourse. The independent voice enabled by the privacy of written expression is the portal out of immersion in the talk going around, including the religious and political talk that reinforces the assumption of stable continuity. Humanism, as an exploration of the independent voice untethered from common discourse, is the expression of the individualistic experience that develops from moving through that portal. Ultimately, the humanist project of self-cultivation through reading and writing, expresses a claim about the fundamentals of human living, including individual freedom and creativity. It points toward a philosophy of living spirit that has never been articulated. (Although Existentialism could be a humanism in this sense. Thank you, Sartre.)  Individualism was always the core of Humanism, based on the privacy of the written voice. This individualism was created by literacy, and so was not an invention of the Euro-American Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had an ancient flowering long before the Enlightenment and before the also famous Renaissance flourish.

By contrast with medieval and old regime devotion to stability, the idea of progress is what defines modernity, and it emerged from the experience of literacy. This culturally transmitted idea of progress includes the certainty that justice requires progressive change in the ordering of society, that justice is impossible without a different organization of property, status, knowledge, and power. Modernity embraces progress as a requirement for health and well-being as well as for justice because the past has been revealed as pervaded by ignorance, superstition, violent oppression, misogyny, tribalism, monotony, poverty, and conformity imposed by fear-based myths of safety in numbers. To various degrees in different places, those dystopian conditions are still normal, but now often recognized as reasons for improvement. Modernity has embraced the idea of future justice through progressive change in the social order, but it has no clear vision of how to overcome the forces that benefit from established injustice. The French Revolution** of 1789-99 was a major effort at government by and for the majority but it was subverted and descended into the Reign of Terror and the imperialism of Napoleon. Marxism was another major effort at justice through equality, but it became a cult of inevitability about the laws of history, highly dependent on a central sovereign power exercising death-grip control by violence, and so could never approach genuine equality. The conservative backlash against these essays in general justice that failed has almost discredited the very idea of progress.

Humanist Individualism: The Third Way

Humanism does not present itself as an authoritative edifice of knowledge, even though it specifically contradicts both religion and mechanistic science, which certainly do. Humanism celebrates and studies the power of human freedom and creative originality, but it doesn’t assert an original conception of human existence in nature that advances an individual-sourced power that can overcome the objections of mechanistic theory from science and deterministic religious conceptions such as original sin, Karma, or divine command and judgment. Humanism has declared human freedom and originality by practicing those powers via individual self-cultivation in the medium of literature, reading, and writing. It thrives because the mechanistic vision derived from science is fatally counterintuitive as a representation of living as experienced by a person. Materialist/ mathematical science misses the self-aware agency that explodes from the conception of time as a personal opening. Religions also lose credibility by separating personality, the restlessly unfinished and incompletely defined existence as experienced by a person, from ordinary embodiment and then aggrandizing it to infinity. In doing that, religions cast strictly embodied personality as inferior, secondary, and derivative in relation to some wildly speculative and implausible original. Both of those authoritative systems in effect leave the ordinary self-experience of the individual out of their picture. So, even now, in this age of knowledge, what it is to be a living human person is profoundly misconceived, and the result is dystopian society. Humanism, though, is still developing, and the way we people of modernity know and live in time has the project of progress inherent in it.

* Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter, written by Ian Mortimer, published by The Bodley Head (2023), The Bodley Head, an imprint of Vintage, is part of the Penguin Random House group. ISBN 978-1-84792-744-6.

**  The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789, written by Robert Darnton, published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books (2023), ISBN: 978-0-713-99656-2.

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Fragment 203, November 6, 2023, The History of Knowledge in Dystopia (word count: 2,365)

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.

Between Spirit and Dystopia

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Fragment 202, word count: 1,379.

Tags: nature, knowledge, simulation, caring, transcendence, politics, religion, science, spirituality, self-possession.

Experience can be situated and explored in terms of two cardinal points of philosophical concern and discovery, with a focus on individuals managing some degree of agency in the interplay of two great forces. The first of these is the force of agency itself: any individual’s own anomalous existence as personality, embodied spirit or intelligence, ideality vectoring future-ward with hope and expectation, with foresight, memory, discretionary will, aesthetic judgments, and power to overcome its own normal habits and regularity, power based on impulses of self-expression, constant learning, and impulses to make a distinctive personal mark on the world. The other force is the individual’s social context of dystopian culture: economic, political, interpersonal, metaphysical. Phenomenology of embodied spirit is at the centre here, ruling out all claims about disembodied spirit, including all-knowing surveillance and moral ledger-keeping. Dystopian societies constitute the main context for spirit, but not the whole context. The context also includes brute uncaring nature as well as the great human interconnectedness, the most important human achievement. There is considerable tension between individual spirit and social dystopia.

Phenomenology of Spirit: Anomalous Existence

Freedom is possible, and indeed actual, because of the anomalous existence of embodied spirit at the unfinished temporal edge of a world always still emerging into existence. Embodiment brings with it a radical individuality of placement, strict locality, and peculiarly personal limits to sensitivity and mobility. The anomalous existence of human personality, as compared to nature’s rocks and rivers, has been characterized speculatively as an existence that reflects or mirrors nature from just outside it, reflecting the world in such a way as to register and be moved by its inexplicable beauty and grandeur. However, we are very bad mirrors of nature. Spirit constructs itself partly as a crude and limited knowledge-simulation of the great environment in which it finds itself, a simulation in the form of ideation, expectation, a non-verbal sense of having a specific location and a specific directionality with respect to a pattern of features in what is open to mobility, all elements of this simulation chosen, assembled, and shaded as an expression of what matters to this particular personality. There is an active gaze by a creative knowledge builder among shapes of matter which don’t matter at all in themselves but only as I or another caring builder project personal dramas outward and bring objects into them. We are not about appreciating the awesome grandeur of the existence of nature, but rather about coursing through time to change and re-create our world, to personalize it and make it a livable and delightful home. There is always a spirit from which any gaze upon objects derives its reasons for being, its expectations and rewards. Every personally experienced visual encounter with objects, every moment of every gaze, every looking, every seeing, is an act in someone’s personal drama. Something is surprising here. Something is missing. Something is being hunted, something expected or hoped for is sought, maybe found. Something is being loved in this loving gaze or feared or hated. Some personal state of dramatic caring must always be the driving source of encounters-of-perceiving with items in the world. Such encounters re-structure and extend the personal knowledge simulation.

So, the metaphysical principle that spirit brings to reality is a principle of personalizing world simulating that builds its suppositional structure around personal interests and cares, creating an embodied life in a world of bodies and other spirits. The world of physics is made up of things, but spirit is not a thing but a spontaneous and fluid vector of intervention into not-itself guided by an imperfect simulation, localized and caring desperately about its own continuing force and viability in the world, a personalizing vector of world-reorganizing.

Roots of Dystopia Now

As for dystopian societies, the kind of stratification that is common globally is exactly as if there was in ancient times an outpouring of conquering herders from the great Eurasian steppe who transferred their control and exploitation of herd animals onto the human communities they defeated by violent assault. This stratification is not mere inequality but exclusionary subjection, contemptuously arranged, the cruel exploitation of creatures made to seem weak and unworthy by those in a position to benefit, who define themselves as noble and superior beings. Another dystopian force derives from the exploitation of fear toward demons and deities, occult personalities. Charismatic enthusiasts convince people they are chosen by divine power to exercise unlimited sovereignty, ownership, over communities, enforcing rules of conduct and rites of submission and self-denial. This foundation of power, like the first, licenses unlimited greed and cruelty, justified by unquestionable assertions of supernatural command. Imperialist war, slavery, colonization, genocide, extractive devastation of the environment, all follow directly from these origins. Such are the living legacies that shape neoliberal capitalist dystopia in contemporary societies. These roots of dystopia begin from metaphysical denigration of human spirit, the failure to recognize human spirit as transcendently anomalous, universally.

Hive-Mind Reality Distortion

In order to maintain coordination among factions in societies with these vicious value dynamics, some special mental accommodations are required. People must be persuaded counter-factually that, no matter how miserably certain groups are living, they themselves, along with most others, have a chance of doing all right, and that, in spite of appearances, the collective is a single entity profoundly unified by transcendent elements: a deity, a sovereign leader, a common origin and history, a destiny, an exceptional grasp of ultimate reality, enemies. Stratification is explained as a matter of merit. Not everyone is equally good. The life style of the most wealthy is idealized and accepted as the measure and proof of merit and worth. Everyone wants to ape the wealthiest, encouraged to take vicarious pleasure in the luxury of those who possess the most. There are goods to be had and ways to win them for those who deserve. It is crucial that people concentrate on the competition for dreamy trophies and not on the exclusionary contempt and cruel exploitation. Attention must be kept on working to do better, on the dream of doing better. Maintaining this focus on dreams of great possessions as a culturally given shared orientation always depends on a body of false but authoritative teaching about sacred and transcendent things, beyond ordinary evidence and logic, declaring that the master/ slave social hierarchy of wealth and power is pre-determined by God or Nature, so sadly inevitable, even though it has to be maintained often by violence and misinformation. The pleasure and relief we gain from companionship and sociability inclines us to full  spectrum imitation and conformity. Such are the bindings of dystopian hive-minds that block awareness of even the possibility of spiritual self-possession.

Bonfire of Vanities

The sometimes comfortable life of a hive-mind focused on market-centred competition for increments of status, value, personal meaning, and self-esteem, existing as a reflection projected back in treatment from the world around, is ultimately a disablingly unspiritual condition. This degree of imitation and conformity feels like a collective evasion of reality, and it is. There is an alternative to this kind of dystopia-masking hive-mind. There is a current of value that doesn’t have to be bought, won, or earned in any way, and can’t be. Self-possession in the dystopian context requires deriving personal value from something other than property, titles, trophies, competition, or anything that can be bought. Recognition of this follows from discovering an innocence, sometimes an active de-culturing, a (figurative) bonfire of cultural vanities. Two connected areas of discovery are crucial: first is direct acquaintance with the anomalous metaphysical self, of spirit, which includes the fountain of original creativity from within. This replaces the cultural denigration of humanity/ personality with a recognition of where transcendence is found in ordinary experience. Spiritual self-discovery is soon followed by discovery of the dystopian context which clashes so violently with spiritual reality. Recognizing dystopia breaks the hive-mind faux-reality, the false sense of political collective identity. This alternative is a personal adventure of existence as embodied spirit recently arrived into a very ancient nature and a vast and terrible cultural edifice. It creates new possibilities for the crucial human interconnectedness.

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

Identity and Idealism

08 Sunday Mar 2020

Posted by in Culture, Freedom, Narrative, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Fragment 161, word count: 653.

In terms of culturally mainstream frameworks of explanation, an exit from dystopia depends on finding a way past the grossly contradictory bifurcation currently embracing at the same time creationist monotheism and scientific materialism, monolithic science alongside myths of angels and demons, as conceptual frameworks for understanding the world and the ongoing improvisation of lives in the world. (Fragment 145: Desperately Seeking Reality.) There is strident institutional support for this historically embedded contradiction, even in the most educationally advanced societies. A religious orientation toward a commanding height blends seamlessly into a hive-mind political-state and into reverence for its war-ready collective drama. Any questioning of that inspires panic for social pragmatists. At the same time, science is the darling of capital accumulators, weapons developers, and advertising media device multipliers. Not a single person in higher boxes of organization charts is looking for a way beyond this cultural contradiction, not since the conservative backlash against the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, movements which disputed the religious-political side of the contradiction based mainly (and regrettably) on an assertion of scientific materialism. It isn’t just that both scientific materialism and creationist monotheism disparage humanity/ personality (the first by conceiving only dead mechanism about which nothing matters in itself, and the second by conceiving human personality as a weak imperfect image of a disembodied original), but also that both are comprehensive systems of explanation that essentially contradict each other and yet have arranged for peaceful co-existence because each solves a fatal deficiency in the other. They tolerate and support each other because neither one is viable alone.

Both of these schools of explanation are dystopian by constructing hive minds on a nucleus of denigrated personality/ humanity. This is easy to see in the case of creationist monotheism with its counterintuitive concepts of sin and the self-denying path to salvation. Romanticism, fables strategically decontextualized from crucial givens of living reality, happily embraces the drama of mysterious ordeals and glorious rewards, and especially thrills on hidden higher powers, so all religion is inherently romantic. On the other side of the coin, the materialist insistence on strict exteriority expresses a distinctly romantic asceticism. Since the core of materialist ideology is a denigrating denial of subjective ideality, of the condition for there being anything that matters, it is incapable of sensing its own emotional underpinning in a Calvinist-inspired romance, asceticism as a heroically purifying gesture. That thread of self-denying asceticism binds scientific materialism to creationist monotheism with a force like a molecular bond, and pre-determines that the gravitas of science, faced with the hive-mind political-state demanding reverence for war, will pragmatically interpret the state as nature’s food chain manifested in human sociability. Science has declared the dystopia inevitable and made it far more lethal instead of questing for a way beyond it.

The only way to end war is to disband the collective identities that commit to and execute wars. That is not something that will be proposed or initiated by any government or corporation or any other collective entity which earnestly works at creating itself as a collective identity. This is something that can only be accomplished by individuals recognizing themselves as such through philosophical thinking. In our hive-minded dystopia, individualizing idealism is indispensable. Since creative novelty emerges from the particular drama that is the interiority of an individual’s living in the world, the modern idealism exploring this, described in Fragment 160 is a framework of orientation that enables individuals to separate viably from hive-minds. This idealism (call it Existential Idealism) leaps past the metaphysical denigration of what has been called human nature. It recognizes human existence/ personality as a transcendence of nature, if nature is conceived as it is in scientific materialism, and instead recognizes personality as an active supra-actuality in such a way that political rights derive entirely from that transcendent existence, existence as living ideality.

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

The Drama of Existence: Between Human and Divine

18 Thursday Apr 2019

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Fragment 146, word count: 520.

Christianity and other antique religions dismissed the world of concrete matter as trivial staging for the great drama that is spirituality, which is to say, the life of personalities. This was a metaphysical orientation that identified personalities, living teleological forces of will, of ideality, as the primordial occurrence of existence. Existence was a matter of subjects and their relationships, involving objects merely secondarily. Although in the Abrahamic religions the drama involved a very great difference between divine and human personality, there are other narratives from historical cultures placing human personalities much closer to the divine, even as active helpers in Creation. These narratives imagine a catastrophe, perhaps rebellion (rebel angels) followed by exile or retreat into the created material world, now turned into a prison under the control of demons who appear as stars and stellar constellations; or human personalities fell in love with the world-in-time they had created and ecstatically entered it, forgetting themselves and by that forgetting were made unable to get out again. However, there are also stories of alchemy in which the turning of base metal into gold is a symbol and a message to humans about human personality learning to re-join the company of divine personality. There are stories of a path across the nested astral spheres, past the demons, a path connecting human and divine personalities that can be taken downward into matter or upward and out. Such was the ultimate drama of existence which marginalized concrete matter, conceiving it as a kind of illusion, perhaps created specifically to confuse and alienate humans from their true and original ideality, perhaps on account of some distant transgression. Although the great drama of existence in the Abrahamic religions has a similar overall shape, involving an initial state of alienation of human ideality from divine and then an eventual joining accomplished by arduous trials and/or divine grace, the stories from other traditions express more directly a sense of an inherent transcendence of human existence as ideality (spirituality), a transcendence that has been made obscure and elusive by the profound difference and difficulty between human ideality and material embodiment. This is plausibly the message of the stories, more important than the speculative particulars. The heart of the drama, the human urgency to discover the transcendent freedom of ideality, can be most plausibly interpreted as a vestigial recognition that the idea of divinity itself is merely a means to highlight the primordial transcendence in ordinary embodied living.

Preoccupation with this sense of transcendence and its difficult relation to material embodiment got stuck long ago in rigid orthodoxies which criminalized any further searching for the truth of it. Those orthodoxies had to be disputed and marginalized for humans to pay attention to the details of the natural world in a systematic and scientific way. However, for by far most of human existence it was taken as obvious that teleologically free wills constituted primordial existence. Science dismissed that creative teleological freedom of personality as merely illusion, just as antique religions dismissed the world of concrete matter as trivial staging for the great drama, the life of idealities.

Please see also:

Fragment 84, June 17, 2015, Errors and Allegories in Gnosticism, (word count: 1,869) URL: http://wp.me/p1QmhU-7b

Fragment 86, November 4, 2015, Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest, (word count: 2,321) URL: http://wp.me/p1QmhU-7f

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

The Most Important Event in History

25 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by in Gender culture, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 140, word count: 1,077.

Before the scientific Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the world as a whole was perceived as a living Being, personified. The innermost reality of all existence was sensed as an expressive voice, creative personality, willful teleology. ‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency’. It is a striving toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, the essence of creation. However, that conception of teleological personality was structured weirdly, as bimodal, with a divine version and a strictly subordinate human version. There was a recognized sameness of transcendence between human and divine personality since both produce coherent utterances and acts expressive of ideation in the forms of caring, knowledge, and intention, unlike inanimate nature. This bimodal personality informs the religious view of the purpose and meaning of life and existence. (In Aristotle’s minority opinion there is yet another version of teleology, final cause, a minimalist bundle of impulses in every individual object, not so dissimilar from his stripped down conception of divine personality in celestial spheres. Aristotle’s instances of final cause are so minimal that they seem almost mechanical, lacking spontaneity. Remarkably, those object essences were incorporated into the Christian conception of nature through the work of Thomas Aquinas.) The point is: for by far most of human cultural history the foundational and clearest kind of existence conceived was the living of vectors of ideality, the teleological vectors of caring we call personalities, known primarily in everyone’s personal experience of caring and of familiar interactions with other beings who express caring. Caring is an ideality at the heart of the transcendence of personality. Things matter to personalities as caring beings. The conditions of our living within a variable world are important to us. Without caring personalities nothing has any importance, nothing matters.

So, considering the question “What should we make of the existence of personality (teleology)?”; we note that what religion makes of it is the creative source of everything, recognizing teleology as transcendently alive, creative, caring, and expressive, but most truly at home at some dimly imagined cosmic horizon, part of a weird denigration of human personality by comparison, making individual human consciousness a frail echo of a cosmic master situated as divine judge and tester of all, a model of sovereignty as absolute ownership over everything less powerful. That patriarchal conception of teleology inspired and sanctified very rigid, restricted, exploitative, and repressively hierarchical top-down societies, dedicated to the culture of violet masculinity, and determined to remain essentially static for eternity, supposedly to persuade the cosmic teleology to tilt benign. Such are the foundations of our current dystopian patriarchies. These societies are not echoes of divine nature but expressions of misconceptions and superstitions developed into enduring cultures, the most extreme fears and fantasies institutionalized and culturally enforced.

The scientific Enlightenment pitched a new idea of fundamental reality, arguably the most important event in history, ridding humankind from oppressive superstitious dread and leaping beyond previous physical limitations through a deeper engagement with nature. It did this by abandoning personification in a transition to an inertial/ entropic conception of events, nothing less than the complete elimination of teleology from the thought of reality. What science makes of teleology, then, is nothing, proposing to interpret all apparent instances of teleology as mechanical structures, pre-set responses triggered by random stimuli. Note that this amounted to an even worse denigration of individual human personality than the weird bimodal religious conception. Materialist science claims the elimination of metaphysics since any idea of transcendence is excluded. However, science presents its ultimate mystery of space/ time/ mass/ energy, Nature, as a distinctly sovereign transcendence, omnipotent and predestining events forever in an extreme version of Calvinism. The novelty is that the scientific mystery is a dead thing, inertial and entropic, with no trace of reason, a world that, in the absence of teleological persons, absolutely doesn’t matter. As such, the scientific revolution was the cultural expression of a metaphysical speculation which unfortunately served exactly the same sanctifying function for existing patriarchal political structures as the weird idea of divine personality.

Empiricism’s Evasion of Metaphysics

An attack, widely considered persuasive, on the idea of personalities as coherent and fundamental realities is David Hume’s empiricist survey of his experience. Like the self for which Hume (no stranger to Calvinism) searched his subjectivity in vain, language competence is also nowhere to be discovered in the “bundle of impressions” that Hume identified. Introspection of the kind described by Hume reveals nothing like a sophisticated linguistic competence, elaborated over a long period of social interactions, but such competence is certainly and crucially present in the whole framework of adult orientation from which any individual makes sense of immediate sensations which arrive and pass as Hume described. Hume was skeptical of the continuity (and so the existence) of a subject, a personality, but linguistic competence does not flit in and out of an individual’s subjectivity like an atomic impression of red. It endures and is built upon, learned and reinvented over a lengthy and complex experience involving the creative arc of developmental continuity of an enduring personality making and integrating insights. Linguistic competence is also very personal, expressing a reading history, for example, as well as regional peculiarities of dialect. (Individual voices exist independently of language and always apply pressure on language-culture to suit their particular ideas of expression, clearly accomplished in the case of William Shakespeare.) Linguistic competence is a complex elaboration of an individual’s orientation in a life in the world, importantly different from a bundle of sensory atoms or impressionistic imprints.

General acceptance of the scientific metaphysics did not eliminate dystopian patriarchal societies devoted to war, but merely put stronger energies, more massively destructive weapons, into the hands of their controlling minorities. Those factions gained new entitlement as instruments of omnipotent nature, above reproach since morality and empathy do not apply to people as mechanistic structures. The root problem in both metaphysical speculations considered here, religion and science, is the perverse denigration of ordinary human personality. As untidy as it might be, the only hope for release from the straight jacket of superstitious dread and the straight jacket of nihilism in the face of all-predetermining Nature is a recognition of two coexisting mysteries: brute uncaring nature and, within it, a vast multitude of localized individually caring personalities of the ordinary kind, transcendent vectors of ideality, creative fountains of novel teleological ideas for their future in the world.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Underdog in the Transcendence Quarrel

13 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by in Freedom, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Posting 138, word count: 560.

In the year 1277 the Bishop of Paris published a condemnation of 219 propositions being taught in philosophy classes at the University of Paris faculty of arts. In that condemnation the arts masters “are specifically proscribed from asserting “that there is no more excellent state than the study of philosophy”…” *. Apparently the Bishop and his intelligence analysts recognized this proposition as an existential threat.

It may not appear so at first glance, but the proposition “that there is no more excellent state than the study of philosophy” was and is incendiary for mainstream ideology. It denies the primacy of property possession, for example, along with the validity of the rights, trophies, and glamour of the strongest. It also asserts the underdog side in an ancient quarrel that was crucial for any Christian Bishop.

From ancient times there has been an ongoing quarrel over transcendence. On one side is the idea of an external sovereign transcendence to be feared and placated, a cosmic teleological force who chooses local agents to impose the universal pattern of sovereign dominance and hierarchy. On the other side of this quarrel is the idea that the only real transcendence is in each and every individual’s teleological processes simply as such. A case can be made that the transition from religion to philosophy is the movement from the first to the second. The mental movement that is philosophical thinking reaches a eureka! of self-recognition as a thinking being, as ideality, with a very special sort of absolute self-sufficiency in thinking. Martin Luther is an example of someone with a clear sense of absolute autonomy as a thinking being (in spite of his belief that the specifics of divine predestination cannot be known). For philosophy to be possible it is necessary for an individual to evade the default enculturation of a personal value-identity assigned by an ambient hive mind, and the norms of social pragmatism based on trust of authority, a superego, sovereignty. The act of philosophical self-recognition is always an individual’s questioning, searching on a principle of relevance intrinsic to a sense of wonder. The philosophical answer is the questioning itself: self-recognition as the sort of being who questions spontaneously, a fountain of original ideality. The way of being of personality is fundamental because that way of being selects and shapes any possible experience.

Thinking, Waking, Self-Possession

Fichte asked: How can an act of thinking wake you from pragmatic getting along to the discovery of yourself as ideality, a creative subject rather than an object? ** A related question is this: Is there some specific thinking that can reliably bring a person to self-consciousness as creative teleological ideality, or is it always just luck or an accident?

Having to make an effort to think about thinking means that pre-philosophical thinking activity is often performed un-self-consciously. To think about thinking is to direct a certain unsatisfied curiosity at curiosity itself. It is to question both questioning and intuitions of what is relevant at a certain moment, and to consider the spiritual condition of readiness-to-recognize something new, how something is learned, to wonder about acts of changing the sensed framework of orientation by which effort is exerted teleologically in a chosen direction. It is to wonder at the teleological structure of the sense of the passing of time.

Notes:

* The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization, written by Jonathan Lyons, Published by Bloomsbury Press (2009), ISBN: 978-1596914599. (p. 195).

** Romanticism, A German Affair, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Robert E. Goodwin, published by Northwestern University Press (2014), ISBN 978-0-8101-2653-4. (p. 42).

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Did Science Make Philosophy Obsolete?

22 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 137, Word Count: 501.

Before the scientific Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the world as a whole was perceived universally as personified, as a living Being. As such, intelligent teleology was thought to be the innermost reality of everything, of existence. That is religion, near enough. Remarkably, the eventful objective world was thought to be never-truly-real, a fleeting, deceptive, dreamlike, and unknowable shimmer, where everything soon becomes something else, always on the point of being different. Time itself was thought to be the genius of failure-to-be-real, and reality, properly identified, was conceived as eternal sameness, the One of Parmenides, a living, conscious, willing, and ideal, sameness. Metaphysics was the effort to identify features of that living ideality which could never change, subsisting without time, and so the stuff of absolute knowledge. In that effort, the transcendence of living intelligence, of personality, was conceived, for example, as logos, a rigidly structured willing that was eternally constant. However, such a removal of ideality from the eventful intervention of personality into actuality is a gross confusion and contradiction of ordinary experience. It completely misses the transcendence of ideality in its bearing toward newness, in the creative will to freedom in that intervention. Ideality is always experience for some personality, and personality is a kind of existence which must actively develop its identity by creating an oriented bearing into the non-actual next moment of embodied life in the world, a newness and incompleteness that can occur only as ideality, never something definite, always bearing into newness in the willing of freedom, and so within time as a technique of living existence. Since time requires some sort of presence of the non-actualities which are no-longer and not-yet, and the only presence other than actuality is ideality, and since ideality is always experience for some teleological personality, then time is a thing of personality and not of actuality.

Eternity is the world that doesn’t matter. Eternity is not transcendent or ultimate reality, and has no merit as the focus of metaphysics. The focus of metaphysics is transcendence, and the transcendent wonder is willful agency, teleology, which is ideality imposing novelty on nature by conceiving and imposing time. Since nature just falls, true becoming isn’t imposed on experience by material nature, but is imposed on material nature by personality in its willful agency.

Thinking of teleology in the narrow sense of goal-oriented movement, purposive action, or future-directed force, is too simple a representation of personality, the self-thinking idea. Of course, personality strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creation and of teleology, but there is more. There is an effortful bearing into indefinite futurity within a broad learned and learning orientation involving both not-yet and no-longer, strict ideality making what sense we can of a largely indefinable situation, curious, caring, questioning. Personality is teleology, which must be ideality, the time-scape ideality of aspiration, expectation, intention, and desperate desire.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Found Buried in the History of Philosophy

25 Thursday May 2017

Posted by in Culture, Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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tags: transcendence, spirituality, dualism, hive mind, philosophy, history, religion, thinking, freedom, Immanuel Kant

A thing to be found in the history of philosophy, a thing which has been carefully avoided, is the fact that the thinking of a series of people who did philosophical work progressed through a slow development from ancient times and finally became confident in a fundamental breakthrough, the essentials of which are present in the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) along with plenty of contradictory and distracting material. The breakthrough is substantially this: the message of personal spirituality is not subordination to an eternal and infinite disembodied spirituality (caring), but instead is individual creative autonomy, an active transcendence at the level of the embodied individual: transcendent individualism.

The Transcendence of Local Spirituality

Philosophical spirituality is not obscure. It is your personal experience, intelligence, or consciousness, but the word “consciousness” implies something impossibly passive, and impossibly “here and now”. Without there, there is no here. Without then, there is no now. The there and the then are always brought to the here and now spiritually by a person’s intelligence intervening in the here and now. Ordinary mental intervention that includes perception of here and now must also include ideation, abstraction, memory, caring, lessons learned, expectations, and aspirations in effortful progress within the sense of the passage of time. It is creative activity, a thought or idea of temporal opening that is thinking itself into the world. Philosophy is (often) a descriptive exploration of that local and temporal spirituality, a recognition of its transcendence in spite of its everyday familiarity. This transcendence is orientation (existence as intelligence) within a continuous newness, with invention, creation, and the openness of alternative and devised possibilities, which is more or less the ordinary sense of being alive, of consciousness. By contrast, in the world of materialism, without transcendence, there may be cycles and variations on similar kinds of events but all within a world that is fundamentally formed and bounded, completed, closed, in something like an unalterable Great Chain of Being. The difference is between a closed world of determinism or an open world of ongoing creation. Normal experience always includes openness, but an openness that must assert itself against the world’s tendency to go closed. The transcendence of the opening is always part of a dualism with closed determinism as its surroundings. That transcendence is the only way in which everything does not have to be as it is. The loss of transcendence carries the implication that everything has to be just what it is. So, philosophical spirituality is a recognition of transcendence at the level of individual embodied intelligence.

What is Religious Spirituality?

This highlights the fact that there are two main contesting concepts of spirituality: the religious and the philosophical. Among religions, there is a widespread assumption that spirituality is inseparably connected to a guilty conscience supposedly inherent in every human, and, from that guilt, a reaching out in surrender to a higher being for forgiveness, healing, and release from the taint and disgrace of being-part-of this world of trouble and strife. The guilty conscience and certain events are considered to be deliberate messages to humans from a supernatural parallel universe containing personified entities of caring with effective power over our world. Those entities and their world cannot be known otherwise, so the behaviour of humans toward them demands belief without evidence, faith in the legends of their mysterious power, and demonstrations of fear decreed by those legends. (faith, fear, guilt, surrender, transcendence of disembodied intelligence) The mystical version is an overwhelming sense of release from guilty individuality through spiritual uptake into the absolute, primordial, and eternal unity of everything. Almost everybody is brought up under the influence of some religion or other, emphasizing obedience to divinely proclaimed rules, with guilt and punishment for disobedience; but hardly anybody learns anything about philosophy as a different (breakthrough) encounter with spirituality.

The problem now is that, culturally, we lost a sense of transcendence during the nineteenth century in an onslaught of scientific materialism, which also had a decisive, and in some ways helpful, role in Enlightenment politics, having gone a long way to undermine the political power of institutions deriving their credibility from the religious story of transcendence. However, we are still wallowing in the metaphysical slough of pre-Kantian materialist determinism. The credibility of the old religious transcendence has been in steady and terminal decline, but is still clung to desperately by many people who remain unaware of any alternative, and who recoil from nihilist materialism. In its combination of scientific denial of transcendence and a clinging to discredited religious conceptions of transcendence, the cultural hive mind that is made available to us in the Euro-American cultural system of the early twenty-first century is debilitating and toxic. What is required now from philosophy is a metaphysics of transcendence in personal spirituality, but that metaphysics has existed for a long time already as the spirituality and transcendence of ordinary consciousness.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Irritation Alert!

21 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Freedom, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Tags: time, spirituality, metaphysics, idealism, religion, civilization, interconnectedness

A certain philosophical position is being developed in these blog postings, and it is likely to be irritating to almost everybody. At the core is a certain metaphysical claim about time, freedom, intelligence, and transcendent spirituality. Time is taken as a spiritual reality although not an objective actuality. This involves a claim that a somewhat novel idealism is required for understanding time, which will be nonsense to people devoted to materialism, realism, empiricism, and the application of those notions in science. However, the account of spirituality rejects disembodied caring, cosmic moral ledger keeping, original sin, a cosmic plan, faith in mysteries, and the relevance of eternity, most of the key features of religions, and so will be distasteful to adherents of religion, both eastern and western, antique and New Age. This philosophical position supports the optimistic claim that the best days of humanity should be in the future, and so will disappoint those who long for a return to the wisdom of ancient, medieval, or other pre-modern cultural systems. In common with an important stream of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy, it finds dystopian features in what is called civilization, in all existing cultural systems including the post-feudal and post-colonial Euro-American regime of investor supremacist capitalism. (These dystopian features are crucially linked to questions of philosophy and yet are unrecognized by historians and social scientists.) That line of exploration will be just noise to supporters of market solutions to social problems such as liberals, corporatists, investors, and most academics. The account given here of the human interconnectedness denies the importance of the masculine virtues of strength, kinetic action, and competitive spirit, and so will be distasteful to sports fans and generally to males in traditionally masculine sub-cultures and occupations. It rejects the importance of the symbols and the pageantry of communal unity and transcendence, of superiority and inferiority, including property accumulation, and so will be opposed by traditionalists, social pragmatists, communitarians, and symbolists. It rejects the legitimacy of sovereignty, and will therefore be distasteful to monarchists, conservatives, communists, and meritocracy enthusiasts. However, it takes human interconnectedness and sociability so seriously that it will be distasteful also to gun and property-focused libertarians. Yet, it is a kind of metaphysics of individual autonomy and supports the universality of individual human dignity as conceived in the Enlightenment, so alienating post-modernists. It rejects the tragic view of life and the spiritually ennobling effect of stories, music, fine arts, and monumental architecture, so will be distasteful to romantics and opera fans. It asserts philosophical thinking, rather than journalism, as the way to hold power to account. Many of the postings may feel long and troublesome to read, with unexpected progressions. However, if you really want the “red pill” experience, then, as Cypher said to Neo: “fasten your seatbelt, Dorothy, ‘cause Kansas is going bye bye”.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.